Let My People Go: Public Education, Jewish Separatism, and School Vouchers

New York magazine has a disturbing story on relations between Ultra-Orthodox Jews and the rest of the population in the western part of Rockland County, New York. The Ultra-Orthodox began moving to the area in the 1970s. Since then, they’ve grown to a majority in the town of Ramapo, where they control a local school board.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the Ultra-Orthodox had much interest in secular education. But they send almost all of their children to religious schools and generally see public schools as a burden to be reduced as much possible. So the board of education has closed schools and cut staff and services to the bone.

What’s particularly striking is that the board members quoted in the piece make little effort to justify these cuts, even as a response to the district’s ongoing fiscal crisis. Consequently, they are seen as a deliberate strategy to drive the non-Orthodox residents out of the area. The board members’ view is that they won the elections, fair and square. As the former chairman put it, “You don’t like it?…Find another place to live.”

Contributors to The AmericanConservative, myself included, often defend local control against the centralized decision-making. The developments in Rockland County illustrate a weakness of that position. Local control is attractive when citizens of a particular jurisdiction have a shared understanding of their interests, which may be different from those in neighboring towns, counties, and so on. It can get ugly when they are internally split between fundamentally opposed goals.

The tension is heightened by the separatist orientation of Jewish community in Rockland County. The New York piece speaks generically of Orthodox Jews. That is misleading because the sects that dominate Ramapo are distinctive in their hostility toward secular society, which includes, in their view, adherents of other forms of Judaism as well as gentiles.

So what’s to be done? Opponents of the board may have a legal remedy if they show that the district is failing to provide the “sound basic education” that the New York Court of Appeals has held to be required by the state constitution. That could be challenging, however, because this standard requires that students be prepared for civic participation, but not that they made be attractive to competitive colleges.

There is also a pending lawsuit that accuses the board of fiscal mismanagement. If successful, it could lead to increased oversight. Another option would to convince the state to take direct control, as requested by a petition by angry residents. But the influence of Ultra-Orthodox voters, who are avidly courted by New York politicians, make this effort unlikely to succeed.

In addition to their practical disadvantages, all these possibilities are essentially centralizing. The challenge for conservatives who are sympathetic to local self-government but concerned about the tyranny of the majority is to find approaches that give students the opportunity to get a decent secular education without surrendering to the state.

That’s where school vouchers might come in. Education reformers often argue that vouchers will improve performance. But the more powerful justification is that they help resolve disagreements about the purposes of education–and of government more generally. Although the situation in East Ramapo is extreme, the tension that it reflects will only become more frequent as our common culture fractures. Rather than fighting for control of a single education system, we should figure out ways to let all students go to schools that best suit their intellectual, religious, and cultural needs.

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23 Responses to Let My People Go: Public Education, Jewish Separatism, and School Vouchers

“Contributors to The American Conservative, myself included, often defend local control against the centralized decision-making. The developments in Rockland County illustrate a weakness of that position. Local control is attractive when citizens of a particular jurisdiction have a shared understanding of their interests, which may be different from those in neighboring towns, counties, and so on.”

Well, from a libertarian perspective this is just the right sort of development. Closing down these idiot factories known as public schools should be done.

The solution to this kind of problem is as simple as it is politically impossible: real local control. That would include local control over local immigration: who moves into the town or neighborhood. If such local control had existed earlier, then presumably the ultra-Orthodox would never have taken over the town in the first place.

Real local control would mean the repeal of the Fair Housing Act, among other things. Like I said, politically impossible. So, you don’t like it? Move out.

CK,
unless you know the quality of the schools in question, idiot factories is likely not accurate…

i’m curious, if these people on the board all send their children to private religious schools, why the heck are they on the school board at all? i would think there should be some sort of requirement that board members have children in the public system they are overseeing or something to that effect.

I think it could solve itself. No one will want to raise a family in an area where the education is subpar and the children are using old Apple computers with the green screens and 8 inch floppy disks. Businesses will not decide to expand there.

Also software over the internet is being used to provide lessons, assignments and automatically grade them. I don’t understand why we must retain the pre-2000s education setup. A kid could be almost anywhere and learn thanks to technology.

Why not divide the county in half? Jews control one part of the county, other people control another part. I think we should start seeing this kind of separatism as fundamentally healthy, a group taking responsibility for its own self-governing. The same thing is happening in Atlanta, except the suburbs are seceding from the city government.

“The tension is heightened by the separatist orientation of Jewish community in Rockland County. The New York piece speaks generically of Orthodox Jews. That is misleading because the sects that dominate Ramapo are distinctive in their hostility toward secular society, which includes, in their view, adherents of other forms of Judaism as well as gentiles.”

This sort of thing will probably only happen more in our country as our population becomes more diverse and becomes balkanized. Our increased diversity has made the already difficult job of running our society more complex.

I fear that people in our country have greatly exaggerated the benefits of diversity. Yes, it can serve the purpose of breaking up group think or bringing in some of the best ideas from other societies. However, it can also mean that you have differently groups of people with very different values. This is really not good for a country and does not make a society stronger.

Ron Paul offered bills for tuition tax credits to parents who choose to educate their children in public, private, or home settings. and tax credits for cash or” in kind” donations to schools and scholarship programs.

“i’m curious, if these people on the board all send their children to private religious schools, why the heck are they on the school board at all? ”

Uh, because they are taxpayers footing the bill. If public education was financed on a tuition basis, much like college and private school, then I agree that it would seem absurd that these people serve on the school board. But when they are paying the bill, they have every right to be on such a board.

But when they are paying the bill, they have every right to be on such a board.

And does that include sabotaging the education system that other children need…not being Jewish and eligible to go their private schools…and selling off school property at cut rate sweetheart deals to the private religious schools?

This is why conservatives are dumb. You should see this as gift-wrapped golden wedge issue. Instead, you do a backflip to central control in order to defend the leftist dominated public school system. Defend the Ultra Orthodox position, while at the same time using the issue to point out why mass immigration from foreign cultures is bad idea. You hit all your bases.

Furthermore, if the Ultra Orthodox win, it means home schoolers will be able to all move into a town and pretty much abolish property taxes. A home schooling town could undercut all competitors and bring in business.

“Rather than fighting for control of a single education system, we should figure out ways to let all students go to schools that best suit their intellectual, religious, and cultural needs.”

Is this really the big issue here? A ferociously tribal group takes over a municipality and essentially says “FU” in every way it can to everyone else and … all we’re supposed to observe and talk about is the effect on the school system and how to remedy that … *other than* talking about or doing anything about the tribalism that caused that problem and no doubt many others too in the first place?

While I realize that the modus operandi of our current politics is precisely this practice of pretending to address a problem by inventing all sort of things to be done *other* than to really, directly address it (see, e.g., immigration), nevertheless it would be refreshing at least to see it deviated from at least once in awhile.

This is obviously an interesting conundrum for a Jewish conservative. Not only is it a political matter, but it relates to the question, “is it good for the Jews?”

So on the one hand, it is definitely good for this one subgroup of Jews, and their strategy coincides with a conservative one to end support for public education.

Yet, is it really good when it evokes the specter of Jews engaging in ethnic cleansing? Some might say, well, it is natural to try to aim for one’s group to become supreme. Well, isn’t that what happened in Nazi Germany?

It is thus incredibly troubling for the author that their political strategy wasn’t grounded in high mindedness about public policy and school funding, but it is grounded in an insistence upon Orthodox Jewish supremacy and an interest in pushing out all outsiders. Nonetheless, when non-Jews talk about this, the wagons can be circled and “anti-Semitism” becomes the rallying cry.

Somehow, stories like these make the anti-Semitism cry seem like an attempt to neutralize and silence legitimate criticism, and thus for some it might not be very sympathetic.

America has always had room for groups that want to form their own separate communities, exclusively composed of like-minded people. One thinks of the Amana and Oneida colonies, New Harmony, and the various Shaker communities. For that matter, the prototypical American community, Plymouth, started out that way. What distinguishes all of these communities is that they were new communities, built from scratch. In none of these circumstances did they move into an existing community and try to shove out the existing residents. (Well, if you are Native American you might disagree with that, but at least Euro-Americans never tried to move right in to native villages.) If people like these orthodox Jews want to live in their own exclusive community, then I support their right to do that. However, the way to go about doing that is to either build their own new community from scratch, or else buy out EVERYONE living in an existing community lock, stock and barrel. This strategy of gradually moving in and then trying to push out everyone else is quite reprehensible.

The School Board is accused of making sweetheart deals with the haridim community. This includes selling school assets, such as schools, to haredim yeshivas at below-market prices. If done deliberately, that is a form of theft. Looting the public treasury to advance any religion is unconstitutional.

Public schools made this country great. The haredim joining the right in destroying them is garbage.

As for “[y]ou don’t like it?…Find another place to live,” that cuts both ways. If the haredim were on the receiving end–as they now are in Israel, of all places–they’d be ranting, screeching, and shining to high heaven.

@Robby: No, in most communities there is no requirement that you “have to have children in the public school” in order to run for school board election. That would be ridiculous. There are many people on school boards who either don’t have kids, or whose kids have long since graduated.

Usually it’s a positive thing when you are trying to get elected – but apparently not in this community.

If the school board is delivering public education within the requirements of the NY State constitution, then where is the beef? They moved in. They ran. They won.

I am not defending their actions per se – personally I find the behavior reprehensible. But the only way to combat this situation to get your own like-minded people to move into the town as well, and run a competitive campaign.

European socialist snark alert:
This is why we have compulsory and decent (usually) public education in Germany.
Although some hilarity ensued when some German parents wanted to homeschool for non religious reasons (which was granted) and found out that there were nearly no homeschooling materials that correctly thought evolution available in Germany.

What I find somewhat baffling about the article in the NY times:
-Does the Ultra Orthodox community not get that they are destroying the futures of the public school children? What do they expect other than hate as a response?

The 1st Amendment to the Constitution separates the establishment of religion from the state. The only rational answer is a Constitutional Amendment,on the Federal level,that separates education from the state. As of today most public schools are here to indoctrinate and not to educate. Therefore,unfortunately, I cannot see this separation happening in my lifetime, if ever.

Samuel, this is an interesting, as well as disturbing, article. I’m wondering if the weakness in the conservative position of local control might be shored up by distinguishing between different kinds of locality.

I went to school in Oregon, where my pre-college education was in two small towns or cities a fair distance apart. The first was a town of ten to twelve thousand, where the nearest town of even a thousand was over twenty miles away. The second was one of not quite twenty thousand, although the overall area was about twice that. The nearest comparably sized town was over sixty miles away. These were autonomous communities, as much as one can be in the modern age.

Rockland County, which I just looked up on Wikipedia, is quite different from this. It’s basically a member of the Greater New York City Metropolitan area. As such, it doesn’t seem to me to be a violation of local rule to say that it should be considered a part of a whole, rather than the whole itself, and thus subject to possible overruling of some of its prerogatives. This sounds like it’s clearly one of them, whether vouchers or public education is the ultimate decision.

Are the members of this sect ‘taxpayers’ — from what I understand, many ultra-Orthodox are welfare reliant. Here, for example, is a story from 1997 about Hasidic use of the welfare system.

“Rabbi Leib Glanz, whose United Talmudic Academy employs about 700 teachers in Southside, said: ”If they can’t take what I can pay, I get someone else. I do not count on welfare when I hire. But clearly welfare has been beneficial to the yeshivas.”

Do a thought experiment and imagine that instead of a group of Jews, it was a group of Muslims aggressively turning a community and its schools inside-out. Instead of invoking Auschwitz and Treblinka to justify their aggression, they invoke the Crusades or the plight of the Palestinians. How many TAC readers would support a group of Muslims working to expel non-Muslims from a community in the USA? In actuality, this is happening in cities all over Europe, but many think it’s a just Muslim problem.